


Darkness and moonlight

by imsfire



Series: Rogue One Anniversary prompts [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Day three prompt: Darkness and light, Established Relationship, F/M, Hoth, Moonlight, post-coital chat, thinking about the past, written for Rogue One anniversary week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 00:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12996195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: A room with outside visual access is both a blessing and a curse, here.  You know what the weather is doing, but sometimes you also feel it, no matter the triple glazing, the force-field and thick insulation; and it’s never really dark, on a world so white with snow that even starlight is reflected all around, and the moon is like a festival beacon.





	Darkness and moonlight

“I thought I was going to die in the dark,” Jyn says, suddenly, quietly, apropos of nothing.  “In Wobani,” she adds after a moment.

She’s curled into his side, half under the covers and wrapped in an old shirt and sleep pants and a thermal sweater that would be large on a Wookiee.  Not that Cassian can claim to be any tougher about the cold; he’s wearing thermals and jogging clothes, and a moth-eaten old fleece on top.  On Hoth, you make love keeping as many clothes on as possible.  It can be interesting; they’ve both learned to find the erotic in the smallest degrees of contact.

Jyn has contact right now; she’s wormed one hand between his layers and her fingertips are on his hip-bone, marking a gentle back and forth line.  Not so much suggesting anything as simply stroking him, as she might Tooky the cat.

A broad band of moonlight falls across them from the tiny window above the desk.  A room with outside visual access is both a blessing and a curse, here.  You know what the weather is doing, but sometimes you also feel it, no matter the triple glazing, the force-field and thick insulation; and it’s never really dark, on a world so white with snow that even starlight is reflected all around, and the moon is like a festival beacon. 

It’s a cold sort of light, the snow-gleam of Hoth at midnight.  But for now, cuddled together in post-coital warmth, he can look at the moonlit snow outside and the light in the darkness here, and take nothing but pleasure in it.  The bedclothes look like silver.  There’s light dusted on Jyn’s cheeks and in her hair, and her eyes are cool and limpid and shining, though her breath is warm on his neck.  He can just see the tip of her nose.

He has no idea what has brought the prison camp back to her.  Hopes it isn’t anything he did or said.  There’s so much hope here, in the bitter cold; whatever can have taken her mind to the fears of the past?

He wriggles his free hand under the covers, raises it to stroke her moon-coloured cheek.  “Wobani?  How?”

“How?  Just – in the dark.  People used to get shivved in the passageways at lights-out, left for the guards to find.  It was – quite common.  I wasn’t popular, I didn’t have outside contacts sending in stims and smokes, I didn’t ingratiate myself with the right people, I didn’t pay my dues, so…”  She shuts her eyes for a moment. “I just - expected it to come, sooner or later.  Probably sooner.  I was cross about it, I wanted to live.  But I didn’t have much to live for, really, not anymore.  And that made me cross as well.  That I’d been – reduced like that.  When I’d never really lived.”

She smiles slowly.  “And then your lot turned up.  Melshi blew the doors off my transport and K tried to throttle me, and you let the light in.”  She snuggles closer and he wraps his arms more tightly round her.   “I thought the bunker on Tamsye Prime was my worst, but – even there, even when I was crying with shame and hate and I couldn’t stop – I was absolutely determined to survive.  To find myself thinking I had no reason to anymore, that was a new low.  I was fighting it, course I was, you know me; but I had started to wonder if there was any point.  Just - despair.  They work you to death, there, so – the shank in a corner would at least have been quick.”

“Oh Jyn…”  Cassian wriggles down till he is as half-buried as she, pulls himself closer to her, kisses her lips.  “Why are you thinking about this now?”

She thinks.  Breath soft on his face.  She’s still got one hand lying inside his sleep clothes, just holding on to his side, no more than a touch to anchor them both in the moonlight and the shadows.  “I – because I can?  I can now, I mean.  It’s – far enough gone.  When it was just – last week, last month – I couldn’t.  I couldn’t bear it.  Make any sense?”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”  He shivers in the moonlight, snug in his warm clothes and bedding and his lover’s arms.  All his own darkness resonates with hers; echoes in an underground maze.  “It was something like that for me too.  I’d stopped thinking there was any hope for me, so long ago that I couldn’t tell you when it went.  It didn’t even seem wrong.  When I thought about myself, my own life, hope was just a word.  A rigid word, like an abstract thing, or a corpse.”

“But you said it to me, you said _hope_ and it sounded real when you said it…  Rebellions are built on hope.  Like it mattered.”

“You jumped on it, like you wanted to attack it!  Like you wanted to bite it.  And me.  And – everything.  But that line, that slogan; it was a good line, it still is.  That’s why we all say it.  And it was still true for everyone else.  There was no reason I knew of why it shouldn’t be true for you too.  Or come to be.  And then you were so angry, and I wanted to defend it from you.” The picture of her face in the middle of that marketplace is sudden and very vivid; bullish and incredulous in the winter sunlight of Jedha.  The light of a place neither of them will ever know again.  “And when I wanted that, it was – it was as if you’d shone a torch on me.  How much good could I still do, if I was in the dark, hating myself?  If I was talking about hope when it wasn’t real to me anymore?”

“It hurts, doesn’t it?  Did it hurt you?  Being dragged into the light, like that?  I know it hurt me.”

“Yes.  Yes, it did.  You were – blinding.  The sun flashing in a mirror.  But you were right.  And you brought me out of the dark.  I’d always thought I’d be stabbed in an alley one night somewhere and left to die, and it didn’t even seem unfair.  In the dark, like you said.  You – your anger, your faith – it was like coming back to life.  Knowing I could still do something.”

“And then we did…” Jyn is still touching him, still smiling.

“And then we did.”

“I’m glad it isn’t ever really dark here,” she says.  “I’m – glad.  About - about so much…” She yawns.

“Go back to sleep, dear heart.”

They pull closer together, deeper into the warmth under the bedcovers, holding one another in the shadows and the moonlight; kiss, and smile, and sleep at last, alive on the frozen world. 


End file.
